Morning Exercise vs. Breakfast: Best Strategies for a Healthy Start

2024-02-18 03:20:28

Breakfast vs morning exercise, which is better?

Established morning habits are the key to an energetic day and good health. Morning exercise is good for more than just breaking a sweat, it energizes you and relieves stress and anxiety. Breakfast starts the engine called metabolism, protects the cardiovascular system, and increases concentration. A combination of breakfast and morning exercise is the best, but there are many cases where it is difficult to kill two birds with one stone. Let’s learn regarding strategies to utilize morning time according to each individual’s goals and health status.

breakfast

Youth in need of academic discipline

If you skip breakfast, your brain won’t work properly. The brain uses glucose made from food as an energy source. The liver and muscles store glucose in the form of glycogen and use it as energy. However, the brain has no space to store glucose. If you skip breakfast, the concentration of glucose in your blood drops and brain activity slows down. Students with active brain activity should eat breakfast to provide sufficient fuel to the brain. However, regarding half of Korean high school students skip breakfast. The more frequent a meal is, the more it affects academic achievement. This is the result of a research team led by Professor Oh Sang-woo (Department of Family Medicine) at Dongguk University Ilsan Hospital, Professor Young-sook Yoon (Department of Family Medicine) at Ilsan Paik Hospital, and specialist Hanbit Moon at Ilsan Hospital, analyzing data from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency’s National Health and Nutrition Survey and online survey of adolescent health behavior. When academic achievement was divided into five groups, the skipping rate for the group with the lowest achievement was 43%, and for the group with the highest achievement, it was 22%.

obese office worker

One strategy that can help you lose and maintain weight in the long term is to eat breakfast. If you skip breakfast, you feel excessive hunger, so you eat more snacks or eat it at the next meal. People who say they can’t eat breakfast may be stuck in a vicious cycle of overeating the night before or in the middle of the night and skipping breakfast the next day. Even if the calories are the same, rather than eating them all at lunch and dinner, eating regarding 30% of them in the morning and the rest spread out over lunch and dinner helps with weight control by facilitating metabolism. In the evening, there is no place to expend energy, so it is easy to store it as fat, but in the morning there is ample time to consume calories.

People with vascular diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure

If your vascular health is poor, it is better to eat breakfast first rather than exercising in the morning. For diabetic patients, exercising on an empty stomach increases the risk of hypoglycemia. When people with vascular problems exercise in the morning, the already active sympathetic nerves are further stimulated, putting a strain on the blood vessels. This is because while you sleep, the amount of water in your body decreases and your blood pressure level increases. If you have cardiovascular disease or are at high risk, regular breakfast is recommended. The American Heart Association (AHA) announced that eating breakfast regularly helps lower the risk of cardiovascular disease by activating metabolism.

Tip

Coffee, cookies, and chocolate do not replace breakfast. These foods are high in calories and make you hungry quickly, making you look for other snacks. In the morning, it is good to eat eggs, rye bread, potatoes, sweet potatoes, fruit, etc., which provide satiety, along with protein foods such as yogurt and silken tofu. Another way is to freeze the porridge and eat it. The brain and organs must feel a certain level of satiety to recognize that it is time to work.

morning exercise

Start your day with energy

It’s easy to think that if you exercise in the morning, you’ll get tired quickly, but that’s a misconception. Morning exercise is a tool to start your day energized. This is because sympathetic nervous system hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, etc.) that wake up the body can be secreted more actively. When you do aerobic exercise such as running, dopamine, a substance closely related to creativity, is actively secreted. Various sympathetic nervous system hormones are also involved in the breakdown of body fat. If you do not have any special diseases and your goal is to lose weight, morning exercise is good for burning fat efficiently.

Rheumatoid Arthritis and Back Pain Management

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis need to exercise to loosen joints that have stiffened due to inflammation overnight. Water exercise such as swimming or water aerobics or light aerobic exercise such as stretching are good. You should avoid running, jogging, or fast walking that puts impact on your joints. People with back pain are also recommended to relieve muscle tension by stretching and deep breathing in the morning and then go regarding their daily routine. It can also have the effect of relaxing the mind. If your back hurts, you should avoid stretching movements that involve bending your back.

A person who often eats alone and is depressed

Eating alone affects depression. There is a study showing that people who eat dinner alone have a 1.4 times higher risk of depression than people who do not eat dinner alone (Journal of the Korean Academy of Family Medicine, 2021). However, even if they ate dinner alone, the risk of depression among people who did regular aerobic exercise was no different from that of people who ate dinner with their family. When you engage in running sports such as brisk walking, jogging, or soccer, the secretion of neurotransmitters such as endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin increases, which can improve your mood and reduce depression. If you have difficulty finding time to exercise in the evening, it is a good idea to actively engage in aerobic exercise even in the morning.

Tip

It is safer and more effective to do high-intensity strength training in the followingnoon or early evening rather than in the morning. Joints and muscles are properly relaxed and body temperature rises, reducing the risk of injury. The exercise effect is also good. In the evening, you use the energy source you consumed at breakfast and lunch, so your muscles are built well. If you are middle-aged or older, you must replenish the calories you expend during exercise with meals and snacks to prevent your physical strength and immunity from being weakened.

Lee Min-young ([email protected])

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